The guest editors welcome proposals for a theme issue of Clues focusing on the representation of disability, broadly defined, in crime and mystery fiction, television shows, films, and other media. We seek a wide range of critical and cultural perspectives on how bodymind anomalousness features in stories about wrongdoing, from the maimed and scarred villains of Conan Doyle to the neurodivergent hero-sleuths of contemporary popular culture. In what ways have impairment, disfigurement, and disease been used to raise the stakes of fear and upheaval in crime stories? How do such narratives perpetuate or challenge ableist notions of order and resolution? Does corporeal vulnerability stoke our pity, sympathy, or admiration—whether for criminals, victims, or detectives whose genius seems to triumph over adversity? Conversely, do the contours of disability facilitate alternative modes of sleuthing and lead to unexpected forms of justice? What alternate forms of knowledge do these characters and texts present and endorse? Since the genre of crime by definition entails what and how we know, how have authors—over time and around the world—engaged disability to probe the meaning of truth?
Saturday, March 23, 2024
CFP: #Disability and Detective Fiction (theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection) -Clues Journal
Friday, March 22, 2024
Call for Abstracts: #Education and Role-Playing Games: #Theory, #Pedagogy, and #Practice
Analog role-playing games (tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, larps [live action role-play], etc) provide opportunities for formative and educative experiences for players. The game’s elements of role-play demand a level of imagination, participatory commitments, self-reflection, creative problem solving, and collaboration from players that most leisure activities do not. This proposed volume will focus on analog role-playing games and their educative capabilities. We are interested in how people learn and are formed by these games, both in and outside of formal educational environments. The volume seeks to examine how these games do (or do not) facilitate educative growth both through theorizing as well as concrete analysis of practice. Both theoretician-oriented and practitioner-generated pieces are welcome, but all pieces should seek to examine broader themes and questions around education, knowledge, and growth through the lens of analog RPGs.
The editor gladly invites proposals for chapter submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:
Theories of education, knowledge, and pedagogy in analog role-playing games:
- RPGs and theories of learning, construction of knowledge
- RPGs and experiential/active learning
- RPGs and vicarious experience
- Bleed and education
- RPGs and civic / democratic education
- The role of AI in RPG play
Analog role-playing games and education broadly through:
- Education around conceptions of race, gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, etc
- Social participation, group membership, social mores
- Conflict resolution and violence in games
- Identity formation and self-discovery
- Transgressive play and education
- Consent practices and boundary setting
- RPGs and depictions of colonialism and exotification
Challenges/Benefits of utilizing RPGs in formal educational settings in regards to:
- RPGs and critical thinking, literacy, social emotional learning, etc
- RPGs and neurodivergent students
- RPGs as distinct from simulations or case studies
- RPGs and math education
- “The dice tell a story” - RPGs and data visualization
- Ethics of usings RPGs in the classroom, especially when dealing with sensitive or controversial subject matter
- Challenges around time management, assessment, and participation
- Considerations/Benefits when using RPGs with specific populations (i.e. children, seniors, ESL, etc)
- Pre and post game practices & reflection
- RPG practices of consent as practiced in a classroom
- Teacher as GM / GM as Teacher
Interested authors should send chapter abstracts of 250-500 words (excluding sources cited), a paragraph author biography, and a CV or resume to educationrpgpedagogy@gmail.com.
The call for chapters ends July 1st, 2024. Authors will be notified of accepted proposals on July 15th, 2024. Authors will submit their accepted chapters of a minimum of 4500 words in length by October 1st, 2024.
All contributors should engage with the existing academic literature on role-playing games. While the editors will not prescribe particular sources or methodologies, proposals should reflect acquaintance with current scholarship on role-playing games.
The project will be submitted for consideration as part of the Education and Popular Culture series. The series is unique as it equally values practitioner-generated pieces on using mass/popular culture as it does theoretician-oriented pieces on studying mass/popular culture, as well as works that exist in the intersections between these worlds. Works in this series take up issues surrounding popular culture in education broadly through pedagogical, historical, sociological, and critical lenses.
Dr. Susan Haarman
Loyola University-Chicago
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Call for Articles: "Christian Missions and the environment" - Religions is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal
Rich Darr
Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo
David Onnekink
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
#CFP: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice : Special Issue: ‘#Materiality in the Short Fiction of #Alice #Munro’
Guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University
‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.’
(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)
Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and Women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.
The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.
Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:
Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging
The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.
Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage by clicking the submissions tab.
For style guide and submission details please see: https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice
For further enquiries please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk.
The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2024.
Ailsa Cox
Monday, March 18, 2024
Call for Papers :Thematic focus of the issue: #Evolutionary Aesthetics – #Aesthetic #Evolutions: Posthumanist Explorations with #Darwin-#TRANSPOSITIONES- new interdisciplinary biannual #peer-reviewed journal
Call For Papers: Cute #Ecologies: a critical-creative Symposium 7th June 2024 Online (Zoom)
Hosted by AWW-STRUCK, this day of lightning talks and presentations on critical research and creative practice features a roundtable conversation between invited speakers (confirmed):
- Miranda Lowe (principal curator of Crustacea at the Natural History Museum London).
- Claire Catterall (curator of Cute at Somerset House, London)
- Hugh Warwick (author of Beauty in the Beast and spokesperson for The British Hedgehog Preservation Society)
Encountering cute forms of nature, from bunnies and hedgehogs to monkeys and deer, is an everyday experience for most of us. They appear on tea towels, cakes and images gone viral on social media. The cute nonhuman might even be our companion animal. The apparently simple, benign nature of cuteness means it goes unexamined, especially in the context of the environmental crisis where the aesthetic is likely to appear irrelevant, if not irreverent. This symposium challenges such thinking by asking: Can cuteness prompt care-giving behaviour for environments? What power dynamics exist in the ‘cutification’ of flora and fauna? What fate for ‘uncute’ species?
Recent developments in cute studies demonstrate the power of cute to increase pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours. Conservation charities know as much, employing the cutest species to drive public donation. However, the bias toward charismatic megafauna is also known to be a problem. Anthropomorphism and domestication emerge again and again in our encounters with the nonhuman. And perhaps ourselves. As cute studies scholar Joshua Paul Dale recently suggested, Homo sapiens may well have emerged because women preferred cuddlier companions to cavemen.
We welcome papers that address topics through critical research and/or through creative practice (poetry, film, performance, music, visual artwork). Topics or areas of research may include:
- Animal studies and plant studies
- Childhood culture and children’s geography
- Charismatic megafauna
- Domestication and scale
- Conservation science and political ecology
- Popular culture, Disney studies, anime and manga studies
- Commodification, material objects and waste
- Technology, cyborgs and artificial intelligence
Possible formats include: 5-minute lightning talks, 20-minute presentations.
Please submit abstracts and/or short proposals (300 words max), telling us whether you’d like to give a lightning talk or presentation to awwstruck.info@gmail.com by 19 April 2024. Please include a short bio (100 words max). If you are a creative practitioner, please include two samples of your work.
This event is organised by Dr Isabel Galleymore (University of Birmingham) and Caroline Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London) who founded AWW-STRUCK in 2021. This symposium is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Call for Applicants : Workshop on Women and Crime Fiction - June- 2024
Ever since the genre established itself in the Anglophone world in the mid-nineteenth century, crime fiction and discussions of crime fiction have tended to underemphasize the role women play in it, unless they are victims or femme fatales. Yet women, as authors, major characters, and audience members, have been a part of the genre since the very beginning. Indeed, it has been about a century since one could have feasibly considered crime and detective fiction (written or otherwise) as a “male-dominated genre,” and scholarship has followed suit: from Kathleen Gregory Klein’s The Woman Detective to Sally R. Munt’s Murder by the Book?, from Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones’ Detective Agency to Gill Plain’s Twentieth Century Crime Fiction – the study of femininity and crime fiction has proved to be extremely fertile ground for analysis and debate.
Quite often, however, these studies and debates remain within clearly defined historical boundaries, with the result that the female detectives and authors of the nineteenth century only rarely come into scholarly contact with their peers from the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” the femmes fatales of the hardboiled mode, the feminist sleuths of the 1970s and 1980s, or the multimedial third- and fourth-wave-feminist contributions produced since the turn of the millennium. Additionally, the investigation of the contents of genre fiction are rarely combined with a study of female recipients.
Studies have shown that women seem to be the main audience for true-crime books (Vicary and Fraley 82). This interest holds true across various media; true crime is the most popular podcast subject in the US (Stocking et al.) and the audience for these highly popular podcasts consists mostly of women (Stocking et al., Greer 154–155). Women are also active as producers of such fare. For example, the genre-defining podcast Serial, hosted, written, and produced by Sarah Koenig, became the first podcast to win a Peabody Award in 2015. Further examples include the podcasts Drunk Women Solving Crime or My Favorite Murder, both hosted by women.
This workshop seeks to counteract the prevailing scholarly compartmentalisation and to bridge the aforementioned historical and disciplinary gaps by convening scholars to present and discuss their work on femininity and crime literature, film, television, videogaming, podcasting, fan fiction, etc., from any historical period. Not only does this approach serve to facilitate a more holistic approach to the long and varied history of crime fiction; it also allows for interdisciplinary and diachronic takes on the topic, bringing together perspectives from different branches of the humanities and social sciences.
Keynote: Dr. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (University of Bamberg): “‘She’s a woman, and women act in a silly way’: Policing and (Re-)Negotiating Acceptable Femininity from the Golden Age to Syd Moore”
Papers: We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers in English covering texts from all kinds of media (literature, film, television, podcasting, videogaming, etc.), discussing topics such as:
- Female characters and stereotypes in crime fiction
- The femme fatale
- Women as audience for crime fiction
- Women as producers of crime fiction
- Intersectional approaches to issues of race, class, and nationality
- The rise of female-led podcasts
- The (physical) female voice of podcasts
- The fetishisation of the female victim
- Historical comparisons, from the 19th century to the 21st
- The ethics of true-crime fiction
- The reception of crime fiction by female authors
- Gender-bending in fan fiction
- etc.
Bibliography
Greer, Amanda. “Murder, She Spoke: The Female Voice’s Ethics of Evocation and Spacialisation in the True Crime Podcast.” Sound Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2017, pp. 152–164, https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2018.1456891.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. U of Illinois P, 1995.
Munt, Sally R. Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel. Routledge, 1994.
Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Routledge, 2001.
Stocking, Galen, et al. “A Profile of the Top-Ranked Podcasts in the U.S.” Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, 15 June 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2023/06/15/a-profile-of-the-top-ranked-podcasts-in-the-u-s/.
Vicary, Amanda M., and R. Chris Fraley. “Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers?” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 81–86, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550609355486.
Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. U of California P, 1999.
Please send your 250-300-word abstracts to alan.mattli@es.uzh.ch and olivia.tjon-a-meeuw@es.uzh.ch in a PDF file. Please also send a separate bionote of about 100 words. The deadline for abstracts is May 1st, 2024.